The secret to brand recognition: effective brand guidelines

A marketing strategy is a big beast. It encompasses everything from email marketing and content creation to PPC and website design. While each component is complex and important, they have to look consistent, feel connected and communicate the same key messages to be effective.

That’s where brand guidelines come in: they ensure your marketing efforts all work towards the same goal and gradually build up brand recognition among potential and existing customers.

What does an effective marketing strategy look like?

The ultimate goal in marketing is to generate successful leads: to do that marketing has to ensure your brand is noticed and remembered by the right people at the right time.

An effective marketing strategy can achieve this, but only if you have one thing straight: your brand.

As Aristotle said, ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’ Your brand is the whole. The elements of your marketing strategy are the parts that must combine to achieve the same end goal: to tell the world who you are and why you’re important.

You can initiate the best email marketing campaign and series of blog posts, but if they don’t align with each other and with your brand, it won't land with your audience. An inconsistent brand experience not only weakens your marketing efforts, it promotes distrust among your customers.

A study into the impact of inconsistency on brand loyalty showed that consumers lost trust for their favourite brands if they noticed something was different. Since it costs more to attract new customers than it does to nurture existing ones, no company wants to lose its loyal fans.

Brand recognition at a glance

Brand recognition might be the biggest barrier your sales team is facing. According to Forrester research, 77 percent of B2B purchase influencers consider brand awareness in decision-making. LinkedIn research also found that 81 percent of B2B buyers reported that the product they bought was the one everyone in the purchasing group already knew about. In short, being recognisable is an enormous advantage for your business: familiarity feels better.

But it’s not just on your website or in a slide deck that your brand has to be recognisable: your brand has to be instantly recognisable in any format. Take the example below. Can you tell which company this eBook cover and website homepage belong to after just a quick glance?

Even without the company’s name on show, the bright orange accents, the 'Hub' product names and the references to marketing and customers lets you know this is HubSpot. Despite the different formats, they both embody the same branding.

Enter the brand guidelines

Brand guidelines are an excellent way to compile all the features that make your brand distinct into one document. Implementing those guidelines is what turns ‘musts’ and ‘must-nots’ into meaningful marketing. It’s what connects your email campaign and your blog series into one recognisable force.

What should brand guidelines include?

Your brand guidelines (sometimes also known as your brand book) are a representation of what your brand should look and sound like to the public so they need to include everything that you value:

• Your brand strategy, including mission, vision, purpose, positioning and key messaging
• Approved fonts
• Heading sizes
• Logo and any approved variations (including colour or lockups)
• Tone of voice guidelines
• Colour pallettes
• Approved images

Good brand guidelines pull your marketing strategy together and ensures that every element works together. To make this all a little more tangible, we’ve gathered a couple of great examples of companies that have used brand guidelines to make their marketing strategy more effective.

Canva

Canva is a freemium design platform that disrupted the enterprise design tool market. It made it possible for non-designers to produce high-quality and consistent creative assets from social media graphics and video thumbnails to logos and presentations.

Why do we like it?

It's no-holds-barred, full-bleed colourful, which is unusual for software that sells to enterprise and makes it stand out against competitors like Microsoft, Adobe and Google. Canva's signature blue and purple gradient is distinctly different from the 'tech blue' that typically dominates SaaS.

Canva's branding in practice

Their website homepage, case study page and video thumbnail all feature their signature gradient, as well as design-related motifs and graphic elements (like the name-labelled cursor) that reflect the tool's capabilities.

Google

With some of the highest brand equity across B2B and B2C, Google's brand is always worth including in examples of brand recognition. The search and software giant needs little introduction, but it's a great case study in how to create a cohesive brand that spans multiple, disparate products.

Why do we like it?

The consistent elements of Google's design language are relatively minimal compared to other brands. But they're instantly recognisable in their form and colour, retaining the brand's original four-colour palette. Google's proprietary 'Product Sans' typeface is also highly recognisable, and its tone of voice is refreshingly clear, approachable and actionable.

Google’s branding in practice

You only need to see those four colours to know who we’re dealing with. Why? Because they’re used consistently across all Google’s marketing, especially with its apps.

Gentian

Gentian is a nature intelligence company that uses advanced AI and high-resolution satellite imagery to deliver fast, accurate biodiversity insights. Their visual design language is consistent, distinct and impactful (if we do say so ourselves: they're one of our clients).

Why do we like it? 

Obviously, we're biased. But we've got the proof: starting with Gentian's logo, which reflects its natural namesake (the gentian flower) but also evokes the company's focus on data and technology. The bright and varied colour palette contrasts with the typical muted 'tech blues' and 'eco greens' of its competitors, and its tone of voice lands the passion and empathy behind their service.

Gentian's branding in practice

We worked with Gentian on both their branding and their website: below you can see how we pulled it through to create impact and cohesion to drive recognition. If you want to see more examples, you can see them in our case study.

Brand matters

An effective marketing strategy needs a recognisable and consistent brand to promote. Customers need to know that when they see this colour with that font and this tone, it’s your brand. Whether you’re sending out newsletters or designing a landing page, they have to follow the same guide. If they don’t, the effort you put into your marketing strategy will amount nothing.